


meadow dusk (sweet dreams of you)

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst and Romance, Character Death, Devotion, Dreams, Dreamscapes, Emotional Sex, F/M, Romantic Angst, Sexual Content, Tender Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-13 14:08:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16019513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: There is a distance between them now that can never be closed and it tears at him like a missing limb.There is no death,she recalls from somewhere,there is the Force.





	meadow dusk (sweet dreams of you)

**Author's Note:**

> entire starry blue worlds of love for [larissa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak), [v](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aionimica) and [thea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/diasterisms), bestest belovedests, for nailing my confidence to the wall when it was nonexistent
> 
> and to [briar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/briarlily) for dragging this kicking and screaming over the line <3

**

 

“I can hear you breathing, you know.”

The night, the forest, the perfect opacity of the dark, all quietly cohere in a stillness that makes Rey feel as though her senses have been muffled. It steals over her the way sleep might have, once: between one moment and the next, a silence that begins to seem impenetrable until—suddenly—she hears it.

Hears _him_ : the soft rush of the patient watcher’s breathing in the darkness, the way the air parts around his living body. Now she can almost feel the spell of silence unravelling, enchanted threads loosening their grip on her tongue.

“I could’ve been anyone,” comes the reply. His voice, touched with amusement and a little wonder, threatens to unmoor her.

 _No,_ Rey thinks, _you couldn’t_.

“Yeah,” she speaks aloud, “but you aren’t.”

He is near, now, so near she can feel how the forest moves to allow him by. Every part of her is pulled toward that place in the shadows at her back, the blind spot where she knows him to be; where she will find him if she only turns to look.

She wants to. She _aches_ to. She has missed him so much that it seems perverse now to make herself wait but—well, this is the game they play, you see.

For a moment there’s nothing more to betray his presence (is he holding his breath? _Cheat,_ she thinks, _you never did play fair);_ the only sounds are those of the night gradually coming back to life around her. In the sigh of the wind through the treetops, the murmur and babble of dark rivers underfoot, it’s as if her ears have been unstoppered and suddenly she can hear again.

It’s a little like walking under the ocean, Rey imagines—or how she would envision it to be, wandering through the midnight world below the waves. The forest envelopes them in a bluish phosphorescence, wing-shaped flowers drifting all around them like eerie creatures on unseen currents, alien blooms trailing bioluminescent nets through the gloaming. Overhead, the last moon of summer wears a halo of ice.

The year is turning. Everything is slowing down, folding in upon itself and gathering close for the onset of winter; the season’s sweetness has a sharp edge to it, like fruit gone overripe in the sun.

There are dead forests all over the galaxy. This place was never alive to begin with.

Still, Rey has never been afraid of the woods. She never learned how to be—she had no one to teach her that childlike fear; no fairytales for the desert’s bastard daughters, she never learned to be wary of the dark eaves at the edge of what is safe and known, the border that exacts a tithe from all who cross it; the hidden world under the trees that will change you in ways you hadn’t known you could be changed, and make something altogether new of you or tear your masks away and show you who you were all along.

Dreaming of green worlds, Rey hadn’t known that the forest can be as much of a menace as a friend: hunting for her meals under the midday star, she never learned how to be prey.

Jakku had its own woods once. She knows those stories well enough: a long time ago it had been a living world, green and flourishing and ripe with enchantment, and maybe deep below the surface it still is. Maybe the planet keeps a little of that forest magic, just enough that even a girl born and bred in the wasteland can stand on the edge of the trees and feel something inside her answer.

Maybe the forest is just the place you carry with you: the place deep down that knows your true name.

“Will you look at me, Rey?”

She will, of course she will. She would have done so regardless, but it thrills her to hear him ask—to know that he wants it so much he would forget his pride for even a heartbeat. She can’t resist drawing out the moment just a little longer, though, taking a deep breath as she slowly turns to fix her stare on the swathe of shadow under the trees. She knows what she will find there in the dark, but she will let herself look for him anyway; let her eyes wander at their leisure and stretch out the seconds till they settle on his face again.

(There were so few things worth looking forward to, in the life before this one. You get used to making the little pleasures last.)

Finally, her gaze will find his, and then there will be no more waiting.

Wordlessly now he will cross the space between them, this great hulking shadow of a man striding out into the sapphire luminance of the night wood, and before she’s even aware of it Rey will be moving too, her feet hardly touching the ground as she surges forward to throw her arms around his neck.

Ben meets her halfway and his own arms come up to enfold her, wrapping her in an embrace so tight she feels her spine pop, but she just presses her face into his shoulder and breathes in his familiar scent. He does the same, nuzzling his nose up and down the line of her throat until she shivers in his arms.

“I’m here,” he murmurs, his mouth brushing her jaw.

 _You’re here,_ she thinks, _you’re here, you’re here, you’re here._

 

**

 

She leads him by the hand through the wood, picking her way across shimmering, mist-laden thickets, hopping over rivers that bleed sweet-scented fumes as they pass. Whether she is guiding him deeper into the forest or towards the edge Ben can’t say—or even whether there _is_ an edge. The trees could go on forever, no beginning and no end in the labyrinth of dreams.

It’s not a world made for the living, every glade and hollow so ripe with poisons that the merest brush of naked skin might be fatal, but Rey is sure-footed as she guides him around the decaying husks of long-dead trees, past the clumps of ghostly fungus frothing from their rotten ribs like lace. Now and then she even glances back at him. She smiles, he thinks, or perhaps it is only a trick of the shadows. The moonlight turns her eyes to chasms that swallow all reflections and let nothing out.

Perhaps all of this is only an illusion.

The wood presses close and Ben is seized by the thought that it isn’t Rey leading him at all, but some dark entity wearing her face. He can’t see her eyes now but he imagines the black consuming them, the beckoning abyss on the other side of her skin. He cannot shake the thought that she’s guiding him to his death.

By the hand she would shepherd him all the way to the shade-world’s heart, so far into the maze that he could never find his way out. She will let go of him, there among the asphodel stalks and the hellebore and the macabre swathes of gleaming, purplish nightshade: she’ll turn to him, her true shape breaking through, and the last thing Ben will see will be the hunger on her face and the moonlight glancing off her sharpened teeth before she sinks them into his throat.

She gives his hand a squeeze, just Rey again.

Eventually they come to a place where the forest opens out, where the trees press less thickly together and their branches form canopies overhead, while meads of strange nocturnal wildflowers carpet the glades below.

Ben lifts his head to take in the oasis of starlight visible through the treetops.

The wind shifts around them. Rey shivers, and the cold can’t touch Ben here but it is as good an excuse as any (not that he needs one) to pull her back into his arms. She settles into him so easily, like her body is the shape he was created just to fit, her head falling to his shoulder as her palm flattens against his heart.

For a little while Ben listens to his own breathing, a strange, lonely sound in the night air.

 

**

 

_Before_

 

“I’ve not done this before,” she admits, after the fourth or fifth incidence of kissing him senseless, her breath hot against his lips because she hadn’t wanted to move further away from him than it would take to speak and even now Ben is leaning in to close the distance with little kisses placed on her mouth, her chin, her cheeks, her brow. “Have you?”

“No,” he pulls away long enough to answer, already missing her. “None of it.”

“None of it?”

“No.” Ben looks into her searching eyes, recognising the strange unspoken hope there. You are the first, he wants to tell her; the first and the last, but the words won’t come and he hopes Rey can read them on his face anyway.

Something that is at once bright and dark settles over her, and then she’s dipping in to brush her mouth over his jaw in a way she is already learning sets him afire. Gently, her teeth catch at his earlobe and tug.

“Good,” she murmurs, her lips fluttering over the artery in his throat.

**

 

_Now_

 

In the shimmering light of the spectral forest, Ben sinks to his knees and guides Rey to sit against one of the trees. He puts his head on her thighs and she threads her fingers into his hair, while he drinks her in, unabashed.

“I miss you,” he tells her, because he does, even when he’s lying in her lap and looking up into her eyes he misses her; misses the time when her soul was bound to his and not even the universe could keep them apart. There is a distance between them now that can never be closed and it tears at him like a missing limb, and even when she is here with him he can feel the absence inside where their bond had lived.

He wonders if she feels it too. If he has become a ghost to her: if the living endure in the dreams of the dead and one day nothing will remain of him but the memories.

Part of him hopes so. His memories of her are the sweetest he has; if they are what survives of him then maybe it will have been worth it in the end.

Rey’s eyes are dark with a bittersweet understanding. “I’m here,” she says, her hands moving endlessly through his hair, “and I miss you too. Always. Every day you’re gone from me.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben whispers, the words pulled out of him against all will.

Confusion flits across her face. “Why?” she asks softly, “I should be the one saying that. I’m the one who was careless.” She looks away, like she can’t bear to face him or the thought of how she’d let this happen. Her hands fall still on the crown of his head and Ben is struck by the sense that she’s prodding at a bruise, picking at the edges of a scab to see if it will bleed. This is a conversation they have had before and no doubt they will have it again. They move through it like a dance now, more memory than awareness, walking the same paths they tread every time.

“Rey…” he reaches up, brushing his knuckles along her jaw.

“I let you go,” her eyes are too bright when she looks down at him again. “I said I would never do that, but I did. I do. Every time.”

“Rey—”

“But you come back, anyway,” she continues, “you always come back.”

The touch of awe in her voice breaks his heart. This girl, who will never believe she is wanted even when he defies death itself to reach her, how can it be that he lost her? How can it be that he allowed it to happen?

“I always will,” he vows. “Always.”

“I know,” she whispers, “you shouldn’t.”

“How can I not?” Ben pushes himself up on his elbow slightly to look into her eyes. _What else is there for me?_

Maybe she hears the thought; maybe she reads it in his face. Rey leans in too and presses her brow to his.

“You told me once there was only one way to find out,” she says against his lips. “To become what we were meant to be.”

_Let the past die._

Ben glowers, mutinous at the implication that _the past_ is what she is.

In his dreams, she is still young and brave, everlasting and unchanged by time. In his dreams, she is still the future he never knew to look for.

The future he never knew to want, till she made him believe it could be real.

“When have I ever taken my own advice?”

That makes her snort, and it is a little victory but he’ll take it. “At least you admit it,” she teases with a smile.

He’ll admit anything, if it means she will stay.

He’ll tear out his own heart if she will still be with him when morning comes.

“I don’t choose to leave you,” he murmurs, “I never will.”

She wants to tell him that he should, he can see it in her face. She wants to be noble, to be selfless the way a good adherent of the Light should be.

But—she wants to be loved, too, and Ben understands. More than anyone, he understands.

“My Ben,” she whispers, her thumb moving over his cheekbone.

“Yours,” he agrees, turning his head to kiss her palm.

 

**

 

_Before_

 

She’s still shaking when he lifted his mouth from her, her trembling thighs loosening from around his shoulders enough that he can prop himself up on his elbows and lean in to trail lazy kisses up toward her abdomen, following the faint line of dark hairs over the lean, quivering muscles of her belly. She is so _soft,_ molten beneath him where only moments ago she had been wild and demanding and fierce, her body rising up from the bed like the crest of a wave to dissolve into candescent light around him.

He’s never known someone so without shame, so unselfconscious and so completely _herself_. She has no room for shame and gradually, by her example, Ben has begun to forget his own: he no longer looks at his reflection with utter distaste; no longer wears his uneven features and hulking form like a stranger in his own skin. She looks at him with trust and want and frustration and even affection sometimes, and in her eyes he sees reflected the man he longs to be.

His lips travel up over her stomach with a patience he might once have reserved for his studies. He’s a pilgrim, he imagines, venturing on a path of faith through the valley between two gently-sloping hills. He pauses along the way to leave offerings in the form of kisses, reverent hands pressing blind prayers into her skin.

“So,” she says, only it’s more of a breath because he had taken her apart and scattered her to the winds and she can’t quite find her voice in the mess he’s left of her. “Never?”

“Hmm?” He’s still nuzzling into her breasts with single-minded focus, his tongue dipping out every now and then to flick over her skin like he’ll never get enough of the taste of her.

“You’d—really never done that before?”

Ben’s already-flushed cheeks grow positively rosy. “Oh,” he mumbles, ducking his head so his hair falls over his eyes. “I—no. Was it...” He licks his lips nervously. Pink and swollen with kissing, the innocent tic becomes obscene.

She probably shouldn’t enjoy it so much—how clearly uncertain he is. She shouldn’t be entertaining the notion of letting him _flounder_ just a little bit longer.

(She never claimed to be perfect though, did she?)

Rey reaches down to rescue him, her hand sliding along his jaw to tilt his face up again. “Yeah,” she nods, wishing she could be more eloquent, but honestly—he’s in her head, if he can’t pick up on how wrecked she is from here— “really. _Really_.”

Ben does that thing where he pulls the inside of his cheek between his teeth and chews on it, which she interprets as him trying not to laugh. He wants to be smug, she thinks, to say something insufferable that would make her roll her eyes and probably pull on his hair a bit (because he hasn’t yet owned the fact that he likes it when she does that), but all she can feel rolling off him in the bond is _relief._

He tastes of her when she kisses him, a strange sharp flavour that fills her with hunger. Just like that she wants him again, wants his mouth and his hands wherever he’ll put them, and the way he groans into her lips lets her know he feels it too.

“Need you,” she whispers, dragging her nails over the clothed expanse of his back.

“You have me,” Ben answers.

 

**

 

_Now_

 

Gradually, Rey moves so she isn’t kissing him from upside-down, easing her legs out from under his shoulders and shifting onto her knees to lean over him. Her hair falls around them, enclosing the two of them in an oleander-scented darkness that lulls Ben’s senses—and rouses others.

She had smelled like the desert, once, like sweat and sun and something mineral like the sands had gotten under her skin. He could taste it on her, he thought, or maybe it was only her memories of heat and sunlight bleeding through the bond. Without it, his senses are his own again, and she smells like the forest around them.

She still kisses the same, sweet and just a little starved, and Ben loses himself in her while he can.

Rey shivers when his fingers pass over the notches of her spine, smiling as her lips move over his. She is in no hurry, her every motion touched with a languid ease, and for a little while it is enough to make him forget that somewhere on the other side of the sky it will be morning soon.

It’s not enough to make him patient. He can reach her now, and wastes no time in slipping under her shirt and filling his hands with her soft breasts, rolling her nipples between finger and thumb until she’s gasping into his mouth, the kiss growing sloppier as she turns to beautiful liquid in his hands. He wants his lips on her more than anything but he contents himself with playing with her breasts for now, until that’s not enough either and he lets one hand skim down over her abdomen to tease at the waistband of her leggings. She shifts to give him better access but the angle is awkward and with a frustrated sound Rey pulls away to wriggle out of her pants. Bare from the waist down, she wastes no time before she’s diving in to kiss him again. This way, it’s just a matter of slipping his hand between her thighs and sinking his fingers into the heat of her.

She whines so prettily when he touches her like this. He’ll never get enough of her, of the way she trembles and moans as he makes room for himself inside her with the eager work of his hands and mouth (the way she comes undone on his lips, his tongue, oh, eternity couldn’t sate his need for the sounds she makes, for the way she _tastes—_ )

Ben kisses her lips again, after, his grip shifting around to her elbow so he can ease her up and back over his torso. Rey goes readily and he feels her smile grow a little sly when she settles over his cock.

“You did miss me,” she teases, rocking her hips back against him. Ben groans and drops an arm over his eyes.

“You’re the worst,” he mumbles.

Her answering laughter fills his chest with the sweetest ache, and he lifts his arm away from his face again so he can see her once more.

Rey is glowing in the darkness, the trees’ dim light falling silver-blue across her shoulders as she lowers herself to lie over his torso, resting her chin on her folded arms. Like this, it’s the simplest thing in the world for Ben to drape his own arms over her waist, settling her more closely against him, and now he can’t help himself—he leans up, brushing a kiss over the tip of her freckled nose. Rey hums, a sleepy, contented sound, but there’s mischief in her eyes when Ben lies back again.

Flattening her palms on his chest, she shimmies backward until she’s straddling him properly, his arousal nestled in the soft crook of her thighs. She rolls her hips again and a low groan tears from Ben’s throat at the _heat_.

 _“Rey,”_ he gasps out, his head lolling back on the grass.

“I missed you, too,” she says again, settling into a slow, sinuous rhythm that makes him see stars, the perfect burning friction of her body against his scattering his thoughts to the wind until nothing exists but Rey above him, Rey around him, Rey, Rey, _Rey;_ he wishes he could crawl inside her and live all his days there.

“I missed your hands.”

Those hands have risen almost unconsciously to her hips (only almost, he could never be anything other than acutely, painfully aware of every single point of contact between their bodies), his fingers skimming along her calves, her thighs, unable to resist playing with the fine hairs there before Ben dips beneath her shirt again to find the sensitive dimples at the base of her spine.

Her own hands are wandering lazily down over his chest, falling to his waist to make swift work of his belt, and then she’s slipping inside and oh, _oh_ —

One hand wraps around him and she gives a slight, teasing squeeze, her eyes dancing at the whimper that falls from his lips. Ben lets her have her fun, coaxing him higher and higher until he’s thick and full and aching in her grip.

“I missed your mouth.” She bends to kiss him again, nips at his lower lip as her hand tightens around his cock, the rough drag of her palm making him pant against her mouth. “I missed your body.” Her other hand braces herself on his midriff to hold her aloft while she positions him beneath her; Ben reaches down to give her a helping hand and with the slightest realignment he’s nudging against the place where her body yields, that impossible molten softness and _yes, yes, there_ —“I missed _this,”_ she trails off into a hiss as he notches inside her and then she’s letting her weight pull her down the rest of the way, humming through the stretch and rocking into the sensation of her body fitting him inside.

 _Death of me,_ Ben thinks, as his awareness narrows down to the place where she surrounds him, his head full of nothing but _heat_ and _soft_ and _Rey_.

And then she starts to _move_.

His hands find her hips again to hold on as Rey uses her leverage to fuck herself, long and deep, like she’s trying to drag the life out of him—and maybe here in the world of shades she could do it, and maybe now that he thinks about it, that wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

He goes out of himself, a bit. The world falls away and with it the weight of flesh and bone, of name and memory; he sheds it all, and she slips in to fill the spaces left behind. Like this, there’s no room inside him for anything beyond the pressure of her palms flat on his chest, her strong legs framing his hips, her body an inferno around him: nameless and unbodied, he surrenders being, and in Rey’s arms falls headlong into the blaze of unbecoming.

“You feel _—perfect,”_ Ben groans and buries his face in the crook of her neck, wrapping his arms around her again and sinking one hand into her hair. “Can I move?”

“Please,” she breathes, “move me, Ben.”

 

**

 

His hand spans the distance between her hips, his thumb skimming over the knotted twist of flesh above her navel; the terrible wound, the one that never had the chance to heal.

He remembers the blood, how much of it there was, the dark iron-rich reek of it. The weight of it on his bare hands.

He had never feared death until that moment.

It’s not fear that surges over him now but rage. Rage, cold and burning, and a sorrow as vast and fathomless as the sea, because the ones that stole her from the world followed quickly after but it wasn’t enough to change what had happened, to put the life back into her, to close the torn-open wound in his own chest where the bond had been but suddenly, numbingly, wasn’t.

“Don’t think about it.” Her hands come up to cradle his face between her palms. Her touch dispels the scarlet fog clouding his vision and releases him from the memory of Rey, motionless, blood-soaked, _lost_. She pushes herself up and over him again; she becomes the sky and Ben is lost. “I’m right here.”

How can I not, he wants to ask her again. How can I do anything but think of you? Tell me how to stop. Tell me how to dream of something else.

Tell me how to let you go.

“I don’t want to go,” he says instead. His voice cracks on the last word.

Ben swallows against the rising ache of grief. All at once he is a child again, a young boy facing yet another goodbye and unsure of how many more partings he can bear.

That boy hadn’t been very good at hiding his heart either. He had tried to learn, and when that had failed he had hidden his face instead, but there are no more masks to hide behind now. No more room for pride; Rey has seen him, completely, from the start, and she chose him anyway. He would die a thousand times over before he let her believe that meant nothing—that it doesn’t break him, every time, to be pulled away from her. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“I know,” she bends to press her lips to his forehead. Her skin is growing colder; the dream is wearing thin. “I know, Ben, I don’t want to either.”

He lifts his hands and buries them in her hair, guiding her down until his mouth finds hers.

Then don’t, he wants to plead, don’t leave me.

He says it with kisses.

He’ll never tire of kissing her. He never would have, even if they’d had years and decades and whole lifetimes together to grow weary of each other’s touch. He would stay like this if he could, lost in the warmth of her and the evanescent pressure of her lips over his own; if the world would never intrude then nothing could make him leave.

It does, though. Always.

There is no dawn in the shade-wood, no morning in the country of the dead, but in the living world the sun will rise again and always, the dream will end.

 

**

 

It’s still mostly night when he wakes, cheeks wet with tears and her name a feverish prayer on his lips. The pinkish light of the full moons flooding in through the viewport for a moment tricks him into thinking the dawn has come, but true sunrise is an hour or more away yet, and Ben turns his face into the pillow to chase the darkness that will take him back to her.

 

**

 

Her fingers catch on a wildflower with bright, sail-shaped petals the colour of snow. The forest awakens at her touch, responding with a flush of silvery bioluminescence that ripples out into the earth in gossamer threads of lunar light. Rey watches them dissipate into ever more delicate filaments and when she closes her eyes she is there in the heart of it all, as much a part of the luminous web that connects the wood as any of its soaring, tangled trees. It breathes through her, endless, eternal, immortal.

 _There is no death,_ she recalls from somewhere, _there is the Force._

Rey lifts a hand to her lips, presses her fingertips to her mouth like she can trap the memory of their parting kiss there. Of the goodbye he had murmured, as the dream dissolved around them; of the promise that no matter how long it took, no matter how far, he would find her again.

The stillness wraps around her once more, no breeze, not even a breath to disturb it now. The last full moon of summer sails overhead on wings of stardust, while half a dozen sectors of sky below, a lone comet explodes in a burst of phosphorescent flame across the night.

It’s so quiet here.

Rey closes her eyes, and makes a wish.


End file.
